Media Reactions to Trump Nobel Nomination are Totally Different From When They Covered Obama’s Nomination

by Brian McNicollon May 3, 2018

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Donald Trump was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the mainstream media is still wrapping its mind around it.

CBS News, HuffPost and the Washington Post each published pieces mocking the nomination or otherwise condemning the idea.

Presidents are known by one sentence, the CBS piece begins, quoting Clare Booth Luce of the Time magazine empire.

“Which brings us to Donald Trump, our frequently offensive, quite possibly bigoted, scattershot, ill-tempered and characterologically deficient president,” the piece, by Will Rahn, said. “Will his sentence be that he brought peace to Korea, forestalled a nuclear conflict, and won a Nobel Peace Prize in the process?’

“It’s unclear how much stock should be put into the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that exists largely to sanctify the political opinions of Scandinavian elites,” Rahn wrote. “And why are Trump’s fans apparently so keen on him winning a Nobel? It’s not because they’re up reading the latest Council of Foreign Relations reports. It’s because the last American president they didn’t like won one in his first year on the job just for showing up.”

That’s not the tone CBS News took when President Obama won the award in his first few weeks in office.

“President Obama had changed the tone of American diplomacy, particularly in contrast to the Bush years,” CBS News’ Mark Phillips wrote at the time. “As more than one commentator had put it, the Bush/Cheney administration had used diplomacy as a last resort.”

Trump “had also ratcheted up tensions with North Korea,” according to HuffPost. “White House officials contemplated striking the country, and he and Kim traded insults.”

Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.), who led the group of 18 Republican congressmen who endorsed Trump for the award, “faces a big primary,” HuffPost reported.

“On Tuesday, Indiana voters will decide whether they want him to be their GOP nominee for U.S. Senate. Much of the race has been about the candidates trying to prove how much they’re like Trump. Messer has pitched himself as a ‘conservative who supports the Trump/Pence agenda,’ and this Nobel Prize push gives him an additional talking point.”

“If there’s one thing that defines Donald Trump’s presidency, it may be his never-ending thirst for validation, applause and credit – even when getting it strains credulity,” the Post’s Aaron Blake wrote. “When it comes to recognition, Trump is a dog after a bone. And political and world leaders have quickly learned the best way to win his favor and bend his ear is to lavish him with praise.

“The result is the nascent movement to award Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his handling of North Korea.”

Blake wrote that he’s “old enough to remember when Republicans were wary of preemptive Nobel Prizes,” and recited quotes along the lines of “What has Obama accomplished?”, which Blake and even Obama acknowledged during his nomination.

Trump has achieved more “concrete progress than Obama had more generally for his Nobel,” Blake wrote.

“But thus far we have only handshakes, a hug and verbally expressed goals when it comes to peace between North and South Korea. North Korea’s pledged actions – including one to dismantle its nuclear test site in public view – are still just that.”

The administration’s efforts to “win unprecedented sanctions against North Korea have pretty clearly played a role; whether his tough talk about ‘Little Rocket Man’ and obliterating North Korea did is less certain, as is what might come of his meeting with the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un.”

Even the President Ban-ki Moon of South Korea said the award should go to Trump — not to himself or North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But that shouldn’t be taken seriously either, Blake said.

“Moon, more than perhaps any other world leader, has gone out of his way to flatter Trump.”

Brian McNicoll

Brian McNicoll is Editor of Accuracy in Media. He is a former newspaper editor, think tank writer and Capitol Hill staffer, is a conservative writer and editor in Reston, Va.